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On Friedrich Nietzsche's The Gay Science (1882, with book 5 added 1887).
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What is wisdom? Nietzsche gives us an updated take on the Socratic project of challenging your most deeply held beliefs. Challenge not just your belief in God ("God is dead!") but uncover all your habits of thinking in terms of the divine. Question the motives behind relentless inquiry: the "will to truth." Realize how little of your life is actually a matter of conscious reflection, and the consequent limits on self-knowledge. The very act of systematization in philosophy overestimates what we can know; instead, we need a "gay" (in the sense of cheerful, carefree, and subversive) science (in the sense of organized knowledge; this is not about modern experimental science) that chases after fleeting insights and is able to question, i.e. laugh at, the pretensions of its own activity. This is the position from which one can then artistically create one's own character and one's values, and this "creation" is not whimsical in the sense of arbitrary, but is a matter of rigorous and careful discernment, an exercise of one's "intellectual conscience." Hear Mark, Wes, and Dylan frolic through this field of aphorisms and short essays.
Read more about the topic, find out exactly which sections we read, and get the text.
swallerstein says
November 12, 2013 at 11:46 amIn the discussion someone wonders whether Central Europe was as Victorian as England during Nietzsche’s lifetime.
Nietzsche is only 12 years older than Freud, and if one reads Freud about sexuality in German-speaking Vienna, one finds a very sexually repressive, Victorian atmosphere.
qapla says
November 12, 2013 at 6:02 pmAwesome episode and discussion.
It’s amazing listening to this, and it has been awhile since I read The Gay Science or the Joyful Wisdom, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (frolic/frolicking is a cognate with frolich)
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/frolic
how I don’t know, how rhizomatic Nietzsche and this work is to so much that has been in the podcasts and blog posts.
What came to mind at one point was a sentence in a pdf dmf linked to:
“…the metaphysics they inspire –whether construed in physicalist or dualist terms – generate a litany of well-known philosophical problems (Dennett 1991 provides a useful catalogue). Worse still, taking such accounts seriously not only sponsors an unattractive metaphysics…”
http://www.academia.edu/245547/Enactivism_Why_be_Radical
Of course Heraclitus, Heidegger, zen, Deleuze and Guattari came to mind, but also Bruce Lee.
The eternal return I always think of Tim McGraw – Live Like You Were Dying
“Like tomorrow was a gift,
And you got eternity,
To think about what you’d do with it.”
“Like everyone else, you want to learn ‘The way to win.’ But never to accept ‘The way to lose.’ To accept defeat, to learn to die, is to be liberated from it. So when tomorrow comes, you must free your ambitious mind and learn ‘The Art of Dying.’”
“In Science we have finally come back to the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, who said everything is flow, flux, process. There are no “things.” NOTHINGNESS in Eastern language is “no-thingness”. We in the West think of nothingness as a void, an emptiness, a nonexistence. In Eastern philosophy and modern physical science, nothingness — no-thingness — is a form of process, ever moving.”
– Bruce Lee
“The meaning of life is that it is to be lived, and it is not to be traded and conceptualized and squeezed into a pattern of systems.” – Bruce Lee
“Life is better lived than conceptualized.” – Bruce Lee
“Truth has no path. Truth is living and, therefore, changing.” – Bruce Lee
“The man who is really serious, with the urge to find out what truth is, has no style at all. He lives only in what is.” – Bruce Lee
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bruce_Lee
much respect
dmf says
November 12, 2013 at 10:21 pmhttp://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm
MikeE says
November 12, 2013 at 11:51 pmI listened to this late Monday night.
I’ve been in a great mood all of Tuesday.
The jury is still out over liability but I think that my testimony regarding how much so many
of these ideas resonated with me should sway them.
Excellent discussion.
Thank you(s).
Billie Pritchett says
November 13, 2013 at 6:15 amPEL Guys:
I really enjoyed this podcast episode.
I have two questions about Nietzsche’s claim about living dangerously and how a certain group of people will be able to live this way, perhaps in the future. Do you think that people living in the post-industrial world are in some respects inheritors of this view? I mean something like the high penchant for individualism, the search for meaning apart from religion, the appeal of libertarian ideals, and so on.
And the next question I would have mainly for Wes: Do you find something sad psychologically about Nietzsche? Here’s a guy encouraging people to live dangerously, but he is in all likelihood quite normal, only just kind of quietly (through writing) raging against the machine. Plus, he talks about the new man having a taste for higher airs, which I’m sure is a metaphor, but also reminds me of the fact that Nietzsche himself seemed to have some kind of respiratory problem that made him prefer (literally) higher altitudes. How would you diagnose him?
Wes Alwan says
November 13, 2013 at 1:44 pmHi Billie — I think Nietzsche saw his writing as the height of gay science and “living dangerously”; I think when Nietzsche talks of danger and heroism, he’s think of spiritual and intellectual danger and heroism. He’s not calling for us to become actual “robbers and conquerors,” or to return to being the “blond beasts” he describes in Genealogy. Rather, he’s asking us to incorporate heroic values into the life of the mind. Notice that his passages on heroic values often directly lead us back to just this: ” Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge!”
dmf says
November 13, 2013 at 10:51 amthings seem to get a little off track when Nietzsche’s take on love (eros not agape?) got turned into a kind of more rational-self-improvement imperative and I think lost the vital (pardon the pun) and even uncanny aspect of un-conscious-ness in that we fall into love (are possessed by loves/desires) and than can come to cultivate/appreciate such chthonic aspects of life, here I think he is close to Freud (yes I know that Freud read Nietzsche as did Jung) on the matters of sublimation and creative/artistic genius, not so
democratic/inclusive/cosmopolitan as some like Dewey are.
dmf says
November 13, 2013 at 11:21 amFN is largely against tightassed puritanism and so being deadly-serious (or PC policing) would be anti-life, but being able to belly-laugh at yourself and at the other absurdities of life fits in my reading/writing of “gay” as enthusiastic.
Pema Chodron strikes me as someone who is working on a contemplative life with a warrior ethos and a sense of humor:
C.-Derick-Varn says
November 13, 2013 at 5:28 pmI always wondered where all the crypto-Kantianism I saw in Foucault came from, and indirectly, you guys have me an answer. Thanks.
David Crohn says
November 17, 2013 at 9:21 amI think also that whereas Kant saw the conditions for knowledge as contained in the mind, Foucault also saw them contained in the power structures of a person’s historical moment.
phil says
November 15, 2013 at 11:50 amGreat episode, thanks guys. Very insightful; Nietzsche was indeed a very fascinating philosopher.
Wayne Schroeder says
November 16, 2013 at 7:16 pmAn excellent podcast due to excellent convergence on the material in addition to the usual entertaining characters. Here’s an example of one of the numerous points of convergence and development of significantly abstract concepts from Nietzsche’s “Gay Science” (I think joyful is a better term than gay or cheerful) (@minute 46):
Wes: “The Slave by being oppressed and having to look in upon himself and dissociate himself from what the Master is making him do gains a certain complexity and self consciousness that someone who’s just a Master, just in a position of power doesn’t have. ”
Mark:” In Genealogy in Essay 2 on Bad Conscience it is the inward turning of instincts that actually carves out inside us the space that we call soul or psyche and he uses that phrase “makes us interesting.” We do not become human until we become oppressed and the instincts have to go inward, or there is no force to create a mind to create a spirit.”
Where there are issues of divergence and difference among the group, the theme seems to focused on the question of what is Nietzsche’s ethic, what does he call good (correct ethic) or bad (bad ethic), and specifically, how do we categorize the psychopath?
I think one more Nietzsche podcast on “Beyond Good and Evil” should clear this up.
Nietzsche has spent a good amount of time clarifying the invalidity of slave morality, of guilt, of conscience, of God or self as arbiter. He is thoroughly pounding moralizing as establishing false truth, false value, false guilt, false conscience, false Gods of selves as arbiters, false masters, false slaves, all of which he dismisses under the label of “Good and Evil.”
This tendency shows up when we try to apply false judgments (moralizing) anywhere. Psychopaths can be bad, but not Evil. A person can be as powerful as Napoleon, but not Evil (though he may use this term sarcastically). There is no such thing as Evil, and the attempt to impose the concept of Evil is precisely what Nietzsche is railing against as the great illusion of mankind.
What then is a psychopath? Bad (not Evil). Who gets to ascribe bad? Individuals, but only out of their own discernment, not out of false moralizing, not appealing to some God (normative is not a good concept in Nietzsche’s project).
Yes, even the bad must be affirmed (even though it is bad), as in the case of the psychopath who does great harm, but who is a product of the human condition, who would be you or me if we had endured the same conditions. Good and Bad are good, but Evil is really bad (as a concept).
P.S. Thanks for illumination of the little known field of ethical philosophy know as fartology, or more formally as flatulentology 🙂
Josh says
November 17, 2013 at 1:52 amWes’ sibilants were like nails on a chalkboard after a certain point in this ep
Wayne Schroeder says
November 17, 2013 at 2:21 amJosh–
They are not sibilants–they are not even related!
On a slightly more serious note, perhaps you could just state what you like about Wes’s comments and what you disagreed with about the others. Thanks, Wayne
Mark Linsenmayer says
November 17, 2013 at 2:24 amHe means his s’s; it’s an audio quality critique, probably caused by the EQ I had on his track and/or the noise reduction plugin. I’ll watch out for that; thanks, Josh.
J J says
November 17, 2013 at 8:10 pmYou guys desperately need to do an episode on Slavoj Zizek!… and an episode on Noam Chomsky too.
Leland Gregory says
November 21, 2013 at 11:04 pmSome great pithy quotes you guys had there.
Dylan: Something about “searching for truth yet being comfortable in uncertainty.”
Wes: “The curtailment of instinct that comes with human society makes us sick.”
Mark: I can’t find the exact quote but it’s the idea that being in the master morality is somehow limiting; the slave morality is forced to adapt and think of new values, to create. I think it’s kind of similar to class struggle, the ones who rise up are the ones who see the system as broken. If you’re rich and living the best life, you have no incentive to change anything, and that can be very limiting.
Donald Freeman says
November 22, 2013 at 1:37 amJust wanted to add in case it was missed that Milan Kundera’s “Unbearable Lightness of Being” is a fantastic read in conjunction with this episode and this work.
Greg says
November 24, 2013 at 12:09 pmHey did you see these mini dialogues making fun of Plato’s socratic dialogues? I dunno where the first ones are though:
http://voices.yahoo.com/the-lost-dialogues-plato-part-three-12133811.html?cat=2
http://voices.yahoo.com/the-lost-dialogues-plato-part-four-12143660.html?cat=47
http://voices.yahoo.com/the-lost-dialogues-plato-part-five-12144400.html?cat=47
now says
June 24, 2014 at 2:46 amNietzsche’s rejection of guilt is problematic in the context of psychopathy; although, if guilt is contrasted/compared w/ empathy and or sympathy it is perhaps less problematic. Nietzsche’s guilt is a social construct. sympathy/empathy could be quantify/qualified neurotically, hence on some level(conceding all as construct too) is emotional and a sensation. psychopathy, in other words could largely being the result of the physical body; the intellectual game of philosophy thus excluding psychopaths and idiots alike. Philosophy is inert in the first place in this context due the body’s physical structure.
Nietzsche is exclusionary(admitting this him self i.e. the herd). Is not the psychopath unlike the herd with respect to inability? Could any given psychopath will them self into guilt/sympathy and the like?
In summery; null question!
Evan says
April 26, 2015 at 2:04 amIf you take seriously the idea that each has their own path, which I do, then you can end up – like the Jungians I think – doing case studies. For the Jungians the unity is the collective unconscious, manifested through archetypes in the individual (I don’t find this convincing).